Report: Black male academic achievement is 'national catastrophe'

More bad news about the academic status of black males: Only 12 percent of black male fourth-graders are proficient in reading, compared to 38 percent for white males, according to NAEP scores highlighted by the Council of the Great City Schools in a new report.

Poverty alone isn’t the difference maker, says the report, which was released Tuesday: Poor white males do just as well as on reading and math tests as black males who are not poor.

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard, told the New York Times in a story on the report. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

Among them: “Conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” Ferguson said. “The activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.”

About the blog

Gradebook features education articles and insights on schools in Florida, focusing on Tampa Bay area schools. What's the latest from the Florida Department of Education? How is the FCAT being used to compare Florida schools? What's going on in Tampa Bay schools? Get an insider's view from the Times education reporting team.